


The Lemur

by BitchOfTheWaste



Category: His Dark Materials (TV), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: F/F, Incest, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:27:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22350322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BitchOfTheWaste/pseuds/BitchOfTheWaste
Summary: Lyra doesn't know her mother's name, her mother's face, her mother's voice. As Marisa's ward she has lived a life of privilege on the razor's edge, denied the truth at every turn, until a single ugly moment sends her spinning into sin and desolation.
Relationships: Lyra Belacqua/Marisa Coulter
Comments: 4
Kudos: 35





	The Lemur

She’s ruining it. She feels it in every strained silence at the breakfast table, in every barely-detectable flinch when she rests a hand on Lyra’s shoulder. She thought things would settle once the questions about Roger ended, but the quiet that replaced them has curdled into something worse over the years. Lyra takes her lessons with a smile. She wears what she’s told, prays as instructed, eats what she’s given. She is charming and tactful with the church officials who move in a river of black broadcloth and white collars and sherry-smelling breath through Marisa’s apartments.  _ Mrs. Coulter’s _ apartments. It leaves Marisa furious every time, hearing those words on her daughter’s lips. It makes her want to scream, to seize hold of the girl’s hair and dash her head against the wall. It makes her want to...

_ Tell her the truth. _

Marisa looks at the thing cleaning itself on the balustrade, smoothing his silky golden hair with clever little fingers. She imagines pushing him, or else climbing up beside him and stepping off into the empty sky. Twenty-two stories. Her thighs clench as she imagines the rush of it. The wind howling in her ears. Her gown pressed against her body, billowing behind her. He looks at her in silence, still busy with his grooming, and she thinks what a hateful thing he is, this little mockery of mankind. A daemon should look like an animal, not a wizened dwarf picking nits out of his hair and eating them where anyone could see.

_ It’s been long enough. _

Six years. Is that long enough? She’s planned a score of admissions. Tearful. Quiet. Shamefaced. Unrepentant. Always she manages to find some way out of it, to wriggle free of the awful fact of her failure, her inadequacy, her craven abdication. Then finishing school had come between them, and on holidays other girls had come home visiting and she had smiled absently through meals and listened at the door to all the late-night whispering and adolescent games, tears pouring down her cheeks, her knuckles, bitten raw, stuffed in her mouth against the scream of jealous rage that would not come. That these empty-headed strangers knew so much more of Lyra’s mind than she did was like poison burning in her veins.

Lyra’s daemon had settled late, just after her fourteenth birthday. Pantalaimon, sweet and cautious, who had always shied away from her. Now the sight of him turns  _ her _ stomach, shows as plain as day the things that Lyra’s flashing smile and clever tongue — so much like Asriel’s — conceal. The way his long black fingers cling to her neck and shoulders, claws indenting pale skin. The way his piercing yellow eyes stare mad and lidless through the dirty blond fall of her hair. A hideous, gangrel thing, gaunt and drowned-looking with its spidery hands and oily, mangy coat. Marisa sees the way that others look at him.

_ If I had fed her from my breast...  _

She glances again at the golden monkey. She bares her teeth at him and lets a long, slow hiss of pure frustration uncoil itself from deep within her belly. He cowers, the May dawn breaking cold and pale behind him over the rooftops of London. She rises from the balcony’s tasteful breakfast table, her chair’s legs screeching over the concrete, and shrieks hot rage at him, a grating bark like a watchdog’s or a jackal’s. He flings himself off the balustrade and toward the open sliding door, moving too fast for her clutching hands. She lurches after him, blood pounding in her ears, and freezes at the sight of Lyra standing in the doorway. The monkey clings to her daughter’s hand, looking back at her in reproachful anger. 

It feels like oil swirling in water, Lyra’s hand on the flesh of her soul. Marisa tastes it at the back of her mouth. She nearly vomits. Nearly. The rage dies. She stands unspeaking, suddenly unsure of herself, as though she stands on the precipice of some great and hidden plunge. Lyra stares at her with those pale blue eyes, like ice with the sun shining through it. The lemur Pan hunches black and spider-thin across her shoulders.

“You look unwell,” says Lyra, her musical voice betraying nothing. She’s taller than Marisa now, built more like Asriel, solid and sleek with an artless fall of straw-colored hair. She’s wearing one of Marisa’s robes, black silk with an MC embroidered in aquamarine thread over the left breast. The wind catches at its too-short hem, revealing a hint of pale upper thigh. “Shall I fetch you a pill?”

The monkey still clings to Lyra’s hand. Marisa fights the urge to brace herself against the table. The appearance of weakness is a weapon only, not a luxury to soothe her troubled feelings. She remembers another day, the monkey’s hands twisting Pantalaimon’s changing form, pinning him against the carpet as Lyra crawled on all fours toward Marisa, whimpering  _ let go, let go, you’re hurting us.  _ She stares at their hands, her daughter’s slim fingers and the monkey’s gnarled and wrinkled black ones.

_ She wouldn’t dare. _

The monkey has touched Pantalaimon twice since. Once in anger when Lyra came back drunk from an afternoon with classmates in the city. And once, on another night, he laid a gentle hand on the black lemur’s neck while Lyra sat on the bathroom floor between her mother’s legs and suffered having her hair scraped and combed into an artful knot before the Michaelmas sermon at Saint George’s. For a moment the echoing white room stood utterly still, Marisa’s breath caught in her throat at the smell of the crown of Lyra’s head, at the silken feel of her daughter’s hair in her hands, and then that moment passed. 

Now the same hot, acrid electricity that pricked Marisa’s fingertips that night is crackling in her stomach, uncoiling itself and shaking loose the flaky remnants of its shed and tattered skin.  _ Sit down at the table,  _ she thinks. _ Invite her to breakfast. _ Lyra’s fingers curl through the monkey’s hair. Tighten. He lets out a hiss of pain and anger, slapping at her arm, scratching and clawing. She smiles.

_ Wouldn’t dare. _

Marisa falls to her knees, sickening pain lancing up her thighs as they strike the cold concrete of the balcony floor. Lyra drags the monkey through the door, her fingers digging hard into his shoulder as he fights against her. It feels as though someone has pierced Marisa’s heart with fish hooks and is hauling on the lines. She reaches out a trembling hand toward Lyra, but the girl slaps it aside without a second thought. Slim fingers bite into her jaw. Her spine feels loose and hot. Her head lolls. The monkey is screaming and she wants to gather him up to her breast and smooth his coat and shower him in kisses, like she used to.

Lyra pulls her chin up until their eyes lock. Marisa gazes blearily up at the younger woman, her body shaking, acid boiling in the pit of her stomach. A cold breeze flattens her gown against her and raises gooseflesh on her skin. Her nipples are stiff in the chill air, chafing against the loose fabric.

Her daughter’s lips move. They make dirty words.

_ “I see the way you look at me.” _

The girl hauls her to her feet and Marisa flinches from the lemur’s bulging stare. Her legs tremble. She clutches at Lyra’s arm, at the fist clenched in the front of her gown. The wind keens. Lyra’s hair flutters across her sharp, pointed face, neither hers nor Asriel’s but something at once starved for both of them and redolent of their furtive, brutish shared disaster. This beautiful, ravenous thing they made together.

Lyra’s lips are parted. She is going to speak again, to say some new unutterable filth that will burn them both alive. Marisa lunges. They crash together into the breakfast table, knocking bone china and flutes of fresh-squeezed orange juice off to shatter on the floor. The monkey squirms free of Lyra’s grasp, his sudden release unleashing a bloom of heat and strength in Marisa’s breast. She forces Lyra’s face into the table, nails scrabbling for purchase, ignores the elbow driven again and again into her side, the leg hooking around her thigh in an attempt to trip her, and then somehow her hands are locked tight around Lyra’s throat and they are kissing in the ruins of their breakfast, teeth clicking together, tongues sliding hot and wet and sinuous, and the strangled, whining gasps of Lyra’s breath washing over her lips and gums.

_ This is base,  _ she thinks as she inhales the smell of Lyra’s hair.  _ This is a sin.  _ In the hollow of her daughter’s neck she can smell Asriel, sweat and lemon oil and a delicate, peppery musk. She licks soft skin, then bites down until Lyra screams. The girl’s nails rake her front, tearing the clasps of her gown, and she hisses against Lyra’s neck as one catches her right nipple. A bright red line of burning pain. She is aflame and writhing with it. A white-hot pilot light flares in her cunt, searing flesh, incinerating one by one her nerves so that they flame out in spectacular pale bursts of overwhelming anguish. Tears roll down her cheeks. Pan and the monkey roll beneath the table, screeching and biting, and Lyra’s hand is tangled in her hair, pulling hard enough to hurt her scalp, to make her feel as though she’ll come apart along these lines of filth and violence.

The girl’s knee presses hard between her legs, thrusting roughly at her cunt. Marisa snarls and pulls away, bright strings of drool stretching clear between their mouths, snapping, vanishing into the wind. Her hands still rest at Lyra’s throat, but the strength has gone out of them. She shudders as the girl’s thick, powerful thigh slides against her dripping vulva, pulling at it and the floral lips that it conceals. Lyra stares up at her coldly, leg thrusting and grinding, and Marisa clings to her. She buries her face in Lyra’s little breasts, soft teacups, a dark birthmark there between them where the robe hangs open, disturbed by their struggle. She kisses it, grinding against Lyra’s leg now, her hips flowing like liquid, a sense of unbearable tautness building in her asshole where she wishes the girl would thrust a finger, like he used to.

_ Tell her the truth. _

Hands in her hair force her down from the table’s edge, down to the floor to kneel on the cold, hard concrete and gaze into the hot mouth of Lyra’s pussy which the girl parts with one hand, nails sharp and manicured. Marisa leans forward with a sigh and presses her face into her daughter’s soft, slick cunt even as she fumbles a finger into her own aching gash. There is glass under her knees, and broken china. Shards dig into her calves. Hot blood. Narrow, febrile shivers of exquisite pain. She laps bitter, gluey fluid, the taste of urine mingled with old blood and a trace of sweetness. It runs down her chin, drips on her breasts.

_ Tell her the truth. _

She looks up, twisting her neck and shoulders to keep her mouth in place. Lyra sits on the table’s edge. Her head is back, her breasts rising and falling with the rhythm of her panting respiration. She plays with them, artless and girlish, squeezing and twisting, pinching nipples between shaking fingers, biting her full lower lip. Her hair is stuck with sweat to the long arch of her neck and plastered across her left cheek and high forehead. The lemur, scratched and disheveled, watches Marisa from her daughter’s shoulder with his mad yellow eyes and expressionless face. He watches her eat.

_ Never. _

Later, when she kneels alone in the echoing darkness of St. George’s, her little silver crucifix gripped so tightly in her hands that the savior and his agonies draw blood from her right palm, she will pray to God to strike her down, to burn her skin, her muscle, her pale bones and the marrow they conceal, until nothing remains. Blood will run from between her trembling, white-knuckled fingers. It will drip from the worn and polished beads of her rosary as she thumbs them, each clicking against the next, to stain the flagstones of the cloister with dark spots. Tendons will jump in her pale cheeks. Lines will deepen at the corners of her mouth.

She will pray for death, and she will smile.


End file.
